Hannah Larrabee | Murmuration

Hannah Larrabee is the author of Sufjan (Finishing Line Press 2017) and Virgo (FLP). She was selected by NASA during a call for artists, allowing her to view the James Webb Space Telescope in person before it launches in 2018; poems written from this experience were featured online and in print at the Goddard Space Center. She’s had work in HOUSEGUEST, The Harpoon Review, Fourth River, Rock & Sling, and Printer’s Devil Review, among others. Hannah teaches writing and works for a software company in Boston. She holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire.

Heliopause

Snow is the backdrop. Things continue
to live
quietly, unharmed,
only hushed.

A child is carried
in this way
through city streets,
blanketed and warm:
a universe
of safety.

We are meant
to stay within each
other, to leave
the confines is to feel
silence. One town over
a man’s wife strayed,
so he wounded
another man
then turned the gun
on himself.

He left her alone.Silence.

Out there,
in a bolder place
than this,
Voyager 1 nudges
against the heliopause;
it is the farthest
we have ever
been.

No one waits for it
save for a few
scientists,
and the morning
news. And no one
waits for her,
not anymore.
The papers all say
her husband was only good,
the kind of man
who cannot be
replaced.

Voyager 1 snaps
a photograph
over its shoulder:
the Earth no bigger
than an egg
glowing in uterus.

Snow is the backdrop.

At home, she wraps
herself in a blanket,
no longer home.

Voyager 1 turns
off its camera
and listens
to darkness.It is not silence, is it.